Richard Wright’s Native Son.

Abstract

Putra, Erik Harninta. Richard Wright’s Native Son. English Department. Languages and Arts Faculty. Semarang State University. This final project is a literary analysis of Richard Wright’s Native Son. The title of this study is A Communist Propaganda Towards American Black Society Through Richard Wright’s Native Son. This novel tells about an American Black named Bigger Thomas who accidentally committed two murders on Mary Dalton, a white girl and his love named Bessie Mears. The Communist, Jan Erlone and Boris A. Max then struggled to support and help Bigger in facing the problem. I chose this topic since this novel intends to spread out the Communistic ideas towards the readers especially to the American Blacks in having their sympathy to the Communism. This final project has three problems to be explored; those are: (1) What forms of Communism are presented in the novel? (2) What are the relationship between Communism and American Black society? (3) To whom is this novel addressed? The writer used qualitative method as the method of investigation. The writer took the data from the text of the novel and compiled some references from several books that were related to the subject matter and searched information on the internet in supporting this study. The data were in the form of words, phrases, sentences, and quotations which were related to the topic. The analysis of this study used sociological approach. It was found out that there are two main ideas of Communism found in the novel; they are the idea in against Capitalism and the idea of alienation. The first idea contains the Capitalist’s intention in using economic, juridical field, and the religion to oppress and exploit the minority class. The second tells that the Capitalist could also make the minority alienated from their own life. Through the novel, those ideas are often paralyzed with the idea of American Blacks’ struggles against racism and prejudice. Therefore, this novel could be regarded as propaganda in having their sympathy to the Communism.